“History is Uncomfortable and Contentious”

Image: thepoisonappleoftheworld.com

As I’ve written before, slavery, cruelty and mass-murder are a disease common among all peoples. Our ancestors have all been guilty of crimes against each other. And so it’s time to speak the entire truth, not just “the truth” that fits the religious/political narrative/agenda of those few who are only concerned with themselves, and to hell with everyone else!

History is Uncomfortable and Contentious

Published on Sunday, 31 July

Until we are prepared to confront uncomfortable truths about our collective history, we will continue to spiral into chaos, destruction and collapse. Since hierarchy emerged, when agriculture created a surplus, humans have been farmed. It started with the domination of nature and quickly evolved into the domination of humans. Farming humans is infinitely more profitable than agriculture. Enforced slavery was the first iteration.

Slavery takes many forms and involves different ethnic groups and nationalities. Europeans, English, Americans and many others fully acknowledge this shameful practice in their past. Why then is there outrage and controversy over references to Jewish slave trade for which there is ample documentary evidence? Black history professor, Dr Tony Martin, first encountered evidence of the Jewish slave trade in The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews in 1992 and started to incorporate references to the practice in his lectures; his book, The Jewish Onslaught, was met with outrage and hysteria rather than intelligent debate.

Justification for Jewish attitudes to black people and slavery was provided by the Talmudic interpretation of Genesis and the banishment of Ham by his father Noah. Jews were by no means the only beneficiaries of the slave trade but to refute their important role is to deny history.

Tony Martin singles out Harold Brackman as a key academic source of this justification who, in his 1977 doctoral thesis, The Ebb and Flow of History, claimed that not only had Ham looked upon Noah’s nakedness but sodomised and castrated him; thus Ham’s descendants were “cursed” with black skin, kinky hair, red eyes, big lips and oversized members, reinforcing the racist stereotyping.

If we don’t honestly confront and acknowledge our past transgressions and embark on a process of truth and reconciliation, we will never resolve our differences and solve the problems in the world.